Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.

It's the circumstances of popular monarchy, the manner in which it's developed, and it is also the fault of the people who present her with this unquestioning adulation. In other words, it's their lack of a larger faith. Which makes them fasten onto, a purely earthly symbol.

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.

I agree with... actually it was [Joseph] Stalin who said that [Winston Churchill] he was a man who changed the history of the world and I think, if he had not been there in 1940, it might very well have been the case that we would have collapsed like France, and I shall honor him always for that.

There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.